"Computing can change our ways of thinking about many things, mathematics, biology, engineering, administrative procedures, and many more. But my main concern is that it can change our thinking about ourselves: giving us new models, metaphors, and other thinking tools to aid our efforts to fathom the mysteries of the human mind and heart. The new discipline of Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computing most directly concerned with this revolution. By giving us new, deeper, insights into some of our inner processes, it changes our thinking about ourselves. It therefore changes some of our inner processes, and so changes what we are, like all social, technological and intellectual revolutions." This book, published in 1978 by Harvester Press and Humanities Press, has been out of print for many years, and is now online, produced from a scanned in copy of the original, digitised by OCR software and made available in September 2001. Since then a number of notes and corrections have been added. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

This paper discusses an effort in the application of artificial intelligence to the access of data from a large, distributed data base over a computer network. A running system is described that provides real-time access over the ARPANET to a data base distributed over several machines. The system accepts a rather wide range of natural language questions about the data, plans a sequence of appropriate queries to the data base management system to answer the question, determines on which machine(s) to carry out the queries, establishes links to those machines over the ARPANET, monitors the prosecution of the queries and recovers from certain errors in execution, and prepares a relevant answer. In addition to the components that make up the demonstration system, more sophisticated functionally equivalent components are discussed and proposed. The work described in this paper represents the joint efforts of an integrated, energetic group at SRI. Members of this group include Rich Fikes (now at Xerox PARC), Koichi Furukawa (now at ETL).

See also: Stanford Heuristic Programming Project Memo HPP-77-25Proc. IJCAI-77: Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp 1014-1029

Proc. IJCAI 77 VOL 1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA AUGUST 22 - 25 , 1977, pp. 67-76 (reprinted in RNLP: 353-362)

Boitet, C. 1977 Where Does GETA Stand at the Beginning of Brinkmann, K.-H.

This text is a description of a computer-based system designed to assist physicians with clinical decision-making. This system, termed MYCIN, utilizes computer techniques derived principally from the subfield of computer science known as artificial intelligence (AI). MYCIN's task is to assist with the decisions involved in the selection of appropriate therapy for patients with infections.

MYCIN contains considerable medical expertise and is also a novel application of computing technology. Thus, this text is addressed both to members of the medical community, who may have limited computer science backgrounds, and to computer scientists with limited knowledge of medical computing and clinical medicine. Some sections of the text may be of greater interest to one community than to the other. A guide to the text follows so that you may select those portions most pertinent to your particular interests and background.

The complete book in a single file.

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SRI Tech. Note 131, AI Center, SRI International, Inc., Menlo Park, Calif.

In researc which lan uac; assumed knowled way it use of provide impreci recent h into a is to e. In that on re of th is used the cons s, to na se acous years, utomati (r,et a nost e need e lan u (pragma traints ke sens tic sit there has c speech u computer of this s to pro are (its s tics). It and expec e of the i nal that i been a nderstan to und recent a vide th yntax an will th tations nherentl s human rroat increase in dine, the purpose of erstand the spoken ctivity, it has been e computer with a d semantics) and the en be able to make which this knowledfre y vaf ue, sloppy and soeech. Syntactic constraints and expectations are based on the patterns formed by a Riven set of linguistic objects, e. .

At the present stage of research in artificial intelligence , machines are stil l remote from achieving a level of intelligence comparable in complexity to human thought. As computer applications become more sophisticated, however, and thus more influential in human affairs , it becomes increasingly important to understand both the capabilities and limitations of machine Intelligence and its potential impact on society. To this end, the artificial intelligence field was ex­amined in a systematic manner. The study was divided into two parts : (1) Delineation of areas of artificial intelligence, and postulatio " of hypothetical prod­ucts resulting from progress in the field , and (2) A judgmental portion, which involved appli­cations and implications of the products to society . For the latter purpose, a Delphi study was conducted among experts in the artificial intelligence field to solicit their opinion concerning prototype and com­mercial dates for the products, and the possibility and desirability of their applications and implications .In IJCAI-73: THIRD INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 20-23 August 1973, Stanford University Stanford, California.